The Treaty Before the Great Winter. Viking Saga Chapter 2
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Hall of Deer Spears – Chapter 2
Hjorthegn lay on the other side of Skjaldra like a dream that seems welcoming until you step inside it. Eirik waded across the river where the current breaks against black boulders and the water bites at his calves like a hungry dog. The ice immediately crept up his bones, that pure, mad cold that doesn’t just want to hurt you — it wants to convince you that the world is hostile and love is a lie. When he climbed ashore, the wind threw snow dust in his face and the pines creaked as if they were talking to each other. The path to the village led through a narrow pass where the rocks glistened with moisture and warm steam rose from holes in the ground — the breath of underground springs, which the people here considered to be the exhalation of the goddess Hlinnara, Guardian of the Thresholds. Above Hjorthegn towered Frostfjall: mountains of steel ice whose ridges looked like the teeth of an ancient giant. And in the middle of it all — long houses with carved deer heads, shields leaning against the walls, drying furs, smoke that hung low, as if it too were afraid of the sky. People did not walk quickly here; they walked as if with every step they were confirming that they belonged to the land, and not the other way around.
The Hall of Deer Spears was warmer than outside, but it was the kind of warmth that did not soften a man—rather, it reminded him of how much he had to lose. The fire crackled in the stone hearth, and bundles of dried herbs hung from the beams, smelling bitter, medicinal, and dangerous. Eirik entered without his helmet, his weapon sheathed to show his intentions, but even so, he felt eyes on his neck like blades. The chieftain of Hjorthegn, old Haldor Staghorn, sat on a raised platform, a white reindeer cloak draped around his shoulders, its fur glistening like frost on moonstone. At his sides stood warriors with spears, and those spears were not just weapons: they were arguments, ready to end the conversation with a single thrust. And by the fire, where smoke rose like a column of prayer, sat Brynja Runeblood — a wise woman with a face carved by time into stone and eyes so calm they seemed threatening. Next to her stood Sigrún Daughter of Mist; her hair was braided into knots in which small bones and runic beads were lost, and there was neither submissiveness nor rebellion in her posture — only tense attention, like a bow just before it is released.
Sigrún Daughter of Mist (Hjorthegn / Deer Spears)
daughter of the chief wise woman, ritual interpreter of dreams. She knows how to listen to silence and read in it what others hide. Her gift is also her curse: sometimes she sees the future as an image torn to shreds. Sigrún is pragmatic – she knows that hunger is the oldest god. And yet she is fascinated by the beauty of things that cannot be eaten or exchanged.
Jorund Ironbeard (Hrafnvík) – chieftain of the Raven Shields
A tough man who learned to survive in a time when even bread was a luxury. His honor is like a shield: beautiful, until you look at it up close. He has a secret: he once broke his oath to save a child. And now he fears that winter will force him to betray again.
Eirik presented the agreement as he had been taught: first praise, then need, then offer, and only finally a request that looked like a proposal. He spoke of shared patrols on mountain passes, of joint hunting expeditions for herds of giant reindeer that retreat to the valley as living reserves before the Great Winter, of the distribution of salt and fat according to the number of children in each house. He spoke of how Skjaldra remembers blood, and that if blood is spilled again, the river may “take offense” and lock the fish under the ice. And then he touched on the most sensitive issue without saying it directly: the ancient bond between clans, a bond that in their culture was not a shame, but a covenant of the flesh that must hold even when words break. A silence so thick rose in the hall that Eirik could feel it on his palate. Haldor Deerhorn smiled slightly—not with joy, but with the knowledge that now it was his turn. “Shared supplies,” he said slowly. “Shared patrols. Shared risk. It sounds like the words of a man who fears his own people will not survive.” There was no insult in this, only description. And that’s why it hurt more.
Brynja leaned forward as if listening to the crackling of wood, but she was listening to something much older. “Nóttfadir has opened the sky,” she said quietly, yet it struck the hall like a drumbeat. “Three months are not an ornament. They are a bill. And the black sun is the ink with which the debt is written.” There was no poetry for beauty in her speech; it was poetry like a knife cutting through the flesh of prejudice. “You may have a contract on your skin, Eirik Wolf-knot. But we want a contract in blood. Not yours. Not ours. Ours together.” Sigrún looked at him, and Eirik had the strange feeling that someone had touched his thoughts with dirty fingers. Her gaze was like fog: dangerous precisely because it appeared gentle. “Mother means a ritual,” she said. “Dreams that don’t lie—they just conceal. If we are to hunt together, we must see what happens when we go alone.”
Thus arose a condition that Eirik had not expected, yet which had its own brutal logic: that night, they would undergo a shared dream ritual as old as the first spear. It was not just a ritual for the gods; it was a test for humans. At the back of the hall, he was offered a drink, dark and thick, with the scent of burnt honey and bitter mushrooms. Ketill would have laughed at it—Brynja called it Hrimsvölr, the Ice Chalice. Eirik realized that his “negotiations” were ending and something was beginning that could not be calculated in bags of barley. When he drank, the world first narrowed to a single point of light in the hearth, and then that point burst, like glass cracking under pressure. The hall dissolved into shadows, and the shadows turned into a landscape.
In his dream, he stood on frozen Skjaldra, but the ice was not ice—it was transparent as the eye. Beneath him, fish with human faces swam and whispered the names of the dead. A wind blew from Frostfjall that had no sound, only meaning, and three moons hung in the sky like three blows of fate. Sigrún walked beside Eirik, barefoot, and her feet did not burn with frost; rather, the frost avoided her, as if it respected her. A figure rose before them, tall and crumbling, composed of darkness and fine stardust: Nóttfadir, Father of Three Moons, with a face that could not be remembered. When he spoke, it was not a voice; it was the feeling that someone was rewriting your past. “Those who want to survive the winter,” it sounded in Eirik’s skull, “must be willing to die within themselves.” And then he showed them a picture: two clans united, hunting together — and yet blood on the snow. Not blood from fighting beasts. Blood from human betrayal.
Eirik woke up from his dream with the feeling that he was drowning, and now he was spitting out water that tasted like truth. The fire in the hall was still the same, but the people were gone. Some faces had turned pale, others had hardened, as if they had just swallowed a stone. Brynja leaned on her staff and looked tired, not from physical exhaustion, but from responsibility. Sigrún’s pupils were dilated, and a vein throbbed on her neck like a living rune. Haldor Staghorn rose slowly, and there was no panic in his movement—only determination. “We saw it,” he said. “Blood on the snow. Betrayal. And yet… without a treaty, we will all die. So there will be a treaty.” He paused and looked at Eirik in a way that resembled weighing meat on a hook. “But it will have teeth. If you break it, we will not just take your supplies. We will take your names.”
Eirik felt the string on his wrist pressing into his skin, as if warning him. And for the first time, he admitted to himself that perhaps he was not negotiating against another clan. Perhaps he was negotiating against winter, against the gods, and against the dark corners of his own people that hunger could awaken. Sigrún leaned so close to him that he could smell herbs and smoke on her breath. “In your dream,” she whispered, “you stood by the blood and did not look away. That is good.” Her voice was soft, but her words were sharp. “Just remember: betrayal doesn’t start with a knife. It starts with an excuse.”
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The Treaty Before the Great Winter. Viking Saga Chapter 1
Chapter 1 of a fantasy saga inspired by the world of the Vikings. Two clans live in the neighborhood, separated by the Skjaldra River and the gray ridges of the Frostfjall Mountains. Skjaldra is not just water: it is a living strip of memory, a stream that “remembers” blood and oaths.